Government Hates Speech Legislation
There is no greater or more dangerous hate than the hate the 'hate-haters' have for those THEY hate
Hi Folks – I have to open today with a double apology – once for taking so long to get to this promised piece, and another for being unable to make of it, what I originally intended.
I am going to link to the full text of the especially insane Canadian version of this fundamentally dictator-boosting legislation at the bottom, and I challenge you to at least have a look at it, and then tell me if you don’t also feel frightened and infuriated, after just a few depressing minutes of study.
Also importantly (and part of why I changed approach), I say the especially insane Canadian version because there are similar piece of anti-rights legislation being tried out all around the Western world. It is this, which makes me think my new approach might actually have more value for more people.
What I originally intended was an analysis of the details of our local variant of state oppression, and the incredible disregard for citizen rights which is reflected in it, everywhere.
Yes – they literally do threaten life in prison for speech itself. And yes this absolutely does signal an empowerment of the state (to judge whether or not the individual citizen is “Hateful”) at the expense of the traditional and essential western presumption of free speech and debate. The word chilling does not even begin to cover the certain effects of this madness. It is an absolutely direct assault on the most important principles and also the most delicate balance of, such democracy as we yet have.
(And entrains damage on a scale which makes orange-man-bad panic look imbecilic and juvenile).
Just in case you are less caffeinated than me (or haven’t yet read any of your own local anti-citizen legislation of this type) my reaction to the text is fury, because the mentality from which this sort of legislation comes is very familiar to me – it is the exact same megalomaniac narcissistic control-freak psychosis I saw reflected in a whole commune full of child abusers and their always faithful allies.
“Unacceptable Views” might not seem a very loaded phrase to my friends from afar, but for Canadians with any kind of a skeptical or curious bent (and especially for millennials and younger), it resonates in a profoundly foul and memorable way. This is the way Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterized the famous trucker convoy – people who he had not met with or talked to – even once.
Folks from afar won’t have caught the echoes of other great marching citizen protests from the west in Canadian history which were ALWAYS put down by unnecessarily brutal State Violence from bigoted out-of-touch (but powerful) Eastern Elites – sometimes motivated by grotesque (orangemen) anti-indigenous racism, sometimes to oppose mass organization of workers and farmers (capital invoking state violence against citizens to defend unfair advantage).
Now – we should also remember how stupid American politics was at that moment – with leftists frothing and proudly overflowing with racist passion against Russia, because they thought Trump was something other than the most American president of all time (which, much as I dislike the guy, he clearly is – in fact, he’s the EXACT pitchman/huckster so long ago predicted by H.L. Mencken as the American people’s truest representative and democratic just desserts) and right wingers were furiously attacking a hundred places where the smug left had ceased to expect any push-back at all.
And there was Covid too, natch – the crux of this widely and wildly misunderstood scene.
So – we were all soaking in an incredible barrage of bullshit propaganda from corporate media, which we must stop to note – at this point, serves the interests of corporations (war/tech/banks) and their preferred marketing demographics ONLY – and we also had both (fake) ‘sides’ yelling “you’re dumb enough to buy this highly emotional bullshit, right?” tribalist deception stories, to rile their base.
What Trudeau was saying was, “I know you are immoral because you oppose me, and I’m perfect.” (and willing to abuse the power of the prime minister’s office in outrageous unprecedented ways).
Now just to be clear folks, it isn’t that I don’t have any preferences or inclinations, on all kinds of levels, but the idea that one half of any western population can now be described as fascist, and one half sweet and angelic, is itself the most fascist idea which has gained popular traction in my lifetime.
Yes, I will explain all those points in much greater detail, because they are as important as can be – and also because they happen to be the reason I don’t think but KNOW that government speech control in an age of social media and AI is way beyond dangerous, to all of the key virtues which yet remain in our still comparatively free, wealthy, and conceptually cross-pollinating western societies.
I’ve seen a few interesting discussions lately, about how frustrating it is that everyone now has to trot out their ‘credentials’ in terms of identity or lived experience, before they can make any kind of a point – lest someone else accuse them of being insufficiently authorized to even comment. I bristle myself, just next door to this – by how often I have to say, “I don’t always agree, but this is worth considering” when that should be absolutely obvious and never need saying (I don’t even agree with everything that I have written anymore, how could it not be still more-so, with others?)
But I actually came around to working chunks of my own life into my writing for a different reason. I’ve always been an outsider navigating independently anyhow, and don’t pay enough attention to even know what I should avoid saying, to retain membership to clubs in which I never have been welcome – not ‘cause I’m too poor, or even because I’m too skeptical, but because I’m too insistent on being fair. I actually use that as a working principle, not a thing of the week slogan-dumb conformity.
To me it is like “showing your work” when you are solving a math problem. The film “Slumdog Millionaire” may be the most perfect capture of this idea in modern popular culture. The poor kid should not know what he knows – but he KNOWS it, and he knows why he knows it, too – life!
Another reason I keep coming back to my various weird jobs is that they really do form the most basic part of my political philosophy. I have considered writing a book “Everything I ever needed to know about life, I learned in retail” several times, but I fear I have missed the moment, since retail is dying (and not even slightly by accident – but that is another essay for another day).
I have long felt University should be inexpensive, but also that you shouldn’t just need good marks, you should also be required to have at least one year of working in a shop, workshop or restaurant, before they consider you qualified to even be let in and trained for ‘finer things’.
Yes, I am capable of bitchy class resentment (like everyone) but this ain’t that. I honestly mean that the specific things you learn about human beings and the way things really work in those jobs, are MORE important than the hyper-specialized model-manipulations of the ivory tower crowd. Foundational in the truest sense – solid realities upon which reasonable ideas can be built.
I say this as a guy who genuinely LOVES conceptual models, mind you – intellectually and even aesthetically – I have the greatest respect and sympathy for pure thinkers, dedicating themselves to ever greater achievements, divorced from mud sinew and struggle. I just haven’t ever had the luxury of living up there myself, and feel obligated to report to them as to all, respectfully, from the position of still down in the mud (and in awfully good company here, frustrating as it remains, for all of us).
What are the key things that people who work with tools, or cash registers, learn about people?
The first is incredibly simple – and might even be the ‘bridge of fools’ by which one can recognize an actual working-class person, as very distinct from someone who wears ‘left’ like a costume, because they think they are supposed to, and anyhow it’s “good”, so it would be immoral not to conform.
Most people are full of shit, most of the time.
I do NOT mean that most people are bad or evil – not at all. I mean most people are thoughtless and sloppy about how they communicate, and how well their words relate to actions and realities.
This isn’t sin, this is absolute normalcy. You smile and nod and expect them to do something much less than what they said, and hope to be pleasantly surprised. Which isn’t learned cynicism, it is the only realistic way to proceed, without constant disappointment undermining your faith in humans.
Here’s the weird thing though, I have also worked in plenty of academic environments (junior high, trade colleges and university) and in THOSE environments (only, in the whole wide world) people act as if the words they use are real and substantial, and they falsely honour one another (by taking themselves unrealistically seriously), to earn their own flattery in turn. Give some – get some – but all of it leading away from the kind of (yes, often rude) working class skepticism that gets shit done!
Mostly by clearing away illusion (which feels rude, but isn’t), so it does not get in the way of function.
Am I saying teachers are dumb? Really not, and this is as good a time as any for me to reach for a favourite touchstone – VARIATION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS EXCEEDS VARIATION BETWEEN TYPES. A genuine understanding of that key reality, instantly makes a huge proportion of our modern arguments look utterly pointless (as indeed they are) and perhaps even purposefully wasteful of otherwise well-meaning civic energy for change. Which is a force that now endlessly frustrates and divides us, steered by a host of academically minded surrealists (unrealists?) in leadership positions around the world, but could instead, IF (ever) steered by working classers, actually GET SHIT DONE.
Plenty of individual teachers are warmly skeptical and realistic about human beings (for those who are deeply interested, teaching is a fantastic way to learn about the nature of people) but the culture of every institution fosters some connections, just as it makes others effectively forbidden, or at very least the kind of contraband that must be hidden from any public note or general criticism.
This is the big difference – not so much the particular mind, but what it is soaking in, year after year (and yes, I can’t resist invoking “Professional Deformation” here, once again – you are what you do).
In the working class, they literally don’t pay you enough to bullshit (and this sentiment is shared in so many words, laughingly, by working classers, all the time – while on the job). If you do your task well, the boss has already got more than their money’s worth from you – they can’t control your attitudes!
So – five seconds after an asshole customer leaves the premises, everyone cracks up and says, what a f@cking asshole! And even though they know the customer will probably return, to inflict more bullshit upon them in future, workers very easily establish their common understanding of wrongness.
It is really important to stop here and recognize another thing a lot of university people overlook. There are a hell of a lot more serious intellectuals in the working class and trades than most assume. There are also (and I say this from decades-worth of in-depth discussions in both environments) far fewer in academe than we assume, who are capable of genuine independent intellectual work. In other words – thinking for themselves – even though thinking is kind of the whole deal, in that realm.
Yes, we can truthfully say there are hard workers and thinkers – and also plenty of mediocre followers and willful slackers too, in any camp or workplace you can name. But in most working class environments, the culture of the place allows the smartest to keep the slowest, fairly well informed and the slowest to keep the smartest from getting too stuck-up or self-important – equally, if not even more, crucial.
In academic environments there is incalculably more pressure to pretend that things which sound great are true, even if we have tons of personal experience which strongly refutes the assertion.
Not only is it not safe to fail to conform, it is not even safe to share with a colleague, that you have had such contradictory experience, since only stories which support the general institutional narrative (of the week) are seen as ‘lived experience’. Being genuine and trying to share best practices learned from direct hard knocks, makes you subject to culling, for failing to show proper alignment.
The thing which people outside of academe really don’t understand about this crazy game, is just how much money has been taken away from the (once primary) teaching side of our higher institutions. There was always some competition and difficulty involved, but there used to be an offer of a path to increasing dignity, as part of work in academe. Now, very few have tenure, and even that isn’t worth nearly what it used to be. The vast majority of teaching hours are actually logged by people who are really still desperately struggling students (only recently graduated) loaded-down with student debt and expectations, all of them competing for way too few spots, with way too little pay and absolutely ZERO guarantee of job security. You get a short term contract (three or six months), and you might get another afterward, but don’t count on it – someone else is always eager to self-exploit and take your place, after all. You could be a wildly talented one-in-a-thousand master in your subject area, but one wrong word and you are OUT! (Seen this with my own eyes, repeatedly, many places – literally discarding the quality of their program, in favour of enforcing conformity).
This is how that old concept “the chilling effect” works. In a situation where all workers have been deprived of basic dignity, there is no margin to make a moral stand, without threatening your own immediate survival, should you run afoul – not of other teachers, but of administrators, whose share of academic monies and authority, by proportion, is totally out of control (doing massive damage).
That is – you don’t have to watch what you say because of how it would be taken by other people who also teach your subject, and understand the exact challenges you face, and approaches from which you must select. You have to watch what you say because of someone whose job is to decide who gets work next season – not caring whether the work will be great, (the students best served) or the workers happy. Only who will be the easiest to manage, with the least bother to admin.
Conversely, the thing that people in academe never seem to appreciate (aside from their own obsession with building mighty conceptual models on balloon-axioms that should have been popped, decades ago) is that as bad as things are in the land of ivory towers (and it really is bad), the working class has actually been squeezed even harder than that, for even longer. Enough to get really mad.
“Leftists” who claim working class anger is about lost white privilege need to spend a few minutes in civics or history class (maybe do go to school this Friday?) The devastated urban areas in the rust belt of America are full of houses that had millions of black owners, who used to be able to buy houses and make their neighbourhoods great places to be, because the WHOLE working class had that much simple payment-dignity (shelter is basic) – and they had it RECENTLY. (in historical terms)
Be clear, people, there is no form of guaranteed annual income which will ever let you buy a house. The (hidden) bargain within this popular delusional aspiration sounds great, but is foul and inhumane. They actually mean – you give up trying to be a citizen stakeholder with real rights and a voice and a part in the steering of democracy, and we’ll give you kibble and a kennel – there’s a good doggy.
NOBODY who ever earned enough to buy their own house would consider that deal an improvement.
The establishment of a permanent underclass has long been desirable, to the powerful overlords and the profiteers who steer and reward them (through all of history, as far as I can tell). Our rich have not only corrupted western governments in general for forty straight years, (the investors-over-citizens revolution, spearheaded by Reagan and Thatcher) they have also created powerful new tools to help them leash-us in huge numbers, cheap – social media, credit, electronic money and now A.I.
But we ain’t doggies (yet).
I love the way life comes at you from three sides, when you have a good walk. It is almost as if you open yourself to all the games universe might want to play on you, which means you must, as with psychedelics, enter with a positive mindset – so that you aren’t startled, and do remember to learn.
A few weeks ago I was walking up Yonge Street when I ran into one of my favourite political reporters in the city. A man with outstanding integrity (especially rare, nowadays) and a great head for detail.
He’s known me a long while, so I could see he was already prepared to chuckle, when I started into a rant about today’s very topic. Not just how wrong-headed this thinking was, but how widespread also.
He gave me a solid bit of skepticism (always welcome) and said that it didn’t seem to him as if the governments of the western world were cooperating, so much as all afraid of the same thing at once.
Having dug too far into ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) – a creepy corporate think-tank that prepares boilerplate evil legislation for unimaginative legislators to use, so they can betray their constituents to corporate interests, without even having to do their own research, I remain convinced that some creepy buggers are talking and sharing, internationally, behind the scenes.
Not saying conspiracy, just creepy buggers, internationally (and seriously, just try and deny that!)
The part that was really making my brain hurt was trying to figure out how such a high proportion of the people in the government in Ottawa got so idealogical (stupid), all at once. Not so long ago, the Federal Liberals represented competent sober technocracy (even when they didn’t say it out loud).
The reporter laughed, “Oh, that one is easy. As soon as Kathleen Wynne was voted out of office, a whole bunch of people from her cabinet hit the highway to Ottawa, to go for a federal seat instead!”
I had to laugh too, it actually was an amazingly great explanation. Then I turned my rant to Justin personally, saying, the moment that idiot said “unacceptable views” he stopped being a legitimate whole-nation leader at all, and revealed his professional deformation as a boxer bully bouncer and an eternally sanctimonious and patronizing-hypocrite schoolteacher. (not trying to besmirch the brand, most bouncers I know are really nice people).
And then, on the sidewalk, despite the expensive and controversial Yonge St bike lanes not ten feet to the fellow’s right, a scruffy millennial all in black, came whizzing by us on his racing bike, doppler-saying “Damn right, fuck Trudeau!”
Like I say, there is nothing like a good walk, to let the universe give you a nice fresh laugh.
For my friends from afar, Wynne was a feisty Liberal premier who did some fine things (no more coal smog from power generation, ever – which counts double, for a guy whose wife has breathing trouble) but also lied outrageously about how she was doing it – saddled us with insane debt while trading away the most profitable parts of a prized Public asset – and did much economic damage to the province and the country as a whole, because of it. The word monomaniacal comes to mind – “never mind the torpedoes – full steam ahead” – sort of thing. Those objecting were steamrollered and insulted.
Did it surprise anyone in the province that Wynn was, originally, a schoolteacher? No, it did not. There was a positive to this (must be noted, to be fair). She was unusually interested in discussion between parties who were not always listened to. Not sure they felt more listened to, but she tried.
The clear down-sides of her professional deformation were several. First and foremost, it was almost impossible for her to resist being condescending and contemptuous to those who disagreed with her.
Justin is now so world-famously and extraordinarily accomplished at this, that Wynne’s own achievements might easily fall from memory, were we to fail to note that she created an institution which supported that ‘dreams over people’ mode of contempt, and her bourgeois banker-headed idealist cadre then fled to Ottawa, where they could patronize insult and infuriate the entire (very usefully diverse and various) country, all at once! Points for efficiency, if naught else.
Thing is – you can’t make stuff if you can’t afford power. Ontario was all about making stuff, but that part of the equation (and all of the jobs in manufacturing, which are downstream of cheap reliable power) never registered to her as a crucial part of her job. The model was beautiful, the institution all agreed (conformed) and the reality of the working class damage wasn’t actually polite to mention.
You probably think I’m exaggerating the extent to which this idiot-club places idealistic visions over practical legislation which reflects respect for workers and consumers, not just managers, bureaucrats and model-crazy academics.
But I’m really not. They recently passed a piece of legislation making it illegal for any company to brag about doing something useful for the environment, unless they can prove it – and here’s the fun part – according to standards which are not yet established and will remain subject to change.
The immediate result? Corporations operating in Canada are all saying, if it costs us billions and we can’t even use it for PR, why bother with mediation? Why not just make the shareholders happy and go for pure profit again? Yes folks – the idealists took steps to outright force all practical business people to do much more damage to the environment, and keep doing it for the foreseeable future, except where outright forced. Because (and you know this is true) “Corporations are stinky anyhow, so anything we can do which screws with them is a win, he he he!” (steepled hands cackle).
Now – before you think I’m being too high and mighty let me fess up, to my shame, I have said stuff exactly that simplistic and dumb myself, many times, and worse yet – meant it! Mea maxima Krupa!
But as I have said before, I do my best to keep learning, rather than finding a set of ideas which flatters my emotions (particularly my indignation – always super-dangerous) and just staying there.
The problem with just hating corporations is that they serve consumer needs, or they would not exist.
I am absolutely not saying they do it in the most sensible way (I can even offer some concrete hope for better on that front, I’ll attach that below also, to give you a nice up-beat, amidst the frustration).
What I am saying is that, on the most basic possible level – we’re asking for it – and to pretend otherwise is just juvenile. (If I see one more “Environmentalist” with SUV keys, I WILL scream!)
So – have I contradicted myself by criticizing an idealist government for respecting corporations and banks far more than the citizens whose land and jobs they were disrupting, with supreme arrogance?
No sir – it’s about choosing a tool that works for a given job, and also what your tool choice says, about what job you were really trying to do. And to be clear there, “banks first” means very little is left – that’s what bankers are good at – bilking a system to the absolute limits (and then some).
Had the communities where the wind-farms were sited been guaranteed the (artificially, and problematically high) rates for all power generated, instead of the manufacturing corporations, we would have unleashed a huge entrepreneurial wave across the (expert manufacturing) region, as each municipality competed to find the most effective way to generate power and add it to the grid. Add a local tax benefit to all parts made here, and you’d have had an industrial renaissance, in what was for the last decade plus, an important manufacturing and export product, globally.
Instead, we actually LOST a wind-turbine manufacturer in Ontario, even while sales should have been booming – because our power got too expensive for them to operate here, and sell to the world.
This is the kind of real cause-effect chain which is obvious to working class people – same as the “You can no longer talk about being good, unless you can prove it, and we won’t tell you how to,” law – the consequences are beyond obvious to people who are used to being told to clean the parking lot.
You don’t get to say – but that garbage offends me – you gotta grab it all and chuck it in the bin, and then, having faced obligatory unpleasantness, you’re done! And free to share hilarious stories about how horrible it was this time, with all your chums who might be stuck doing it, next time. Laugh riot!
If you run a company in such a way that everyone who gives an order, knows the task, you get a certain result (and a whole lot of spirit). I’ll never forget the richest man I ever knew, picking up garbage from his own store parking-lot at age seventy – even with a staff of dozens just a few feet away, who he could have called to do it for him. Never got too proud for the little jobs (nor did anyone who ever worked for him get away with saying – but that isn’t in my job description – without very quickly being roundly and uproariously shamed! The old man still does it – so you can too, kid).
There have been times when the government felt as if it had useful connections to workers, and not just academics and corporations – again, the Liberals were once superb technocrats, got shit done.
In my experience, that simply does not happen unless there is some functional chain of respect, all the way down to the level of the individual worker (nurse, soldier, postie, cop). When management (or the senior faculty) is full of people who are in love with their ideas, but not so concerned with the needs and rights of other people, especially people who disagree with their ideas, you break that chain and very soon several bad things start happening. The best people in every institution say “F@ck-it, this is way too much bullshit” and move on to an environment where they can again make the reality-anchor jokes so foreign in institutions, and so normal to the happily-rude working class.
They aren’t wrong, either. Rights and respect are important, when you get signals that they are subject to disruption or destruction at a moment’s notice, people hear – make other plans, now.
But the other nasty consequence is that you fail to attract the most motivated junior people. They too look at the deplorably low rewards now on offer, in exchange for more work and far more risk than ever, and they decide public service is not for them, not in any form. Too many idiots in charge.
Which means you get a culture of mediocre conformist idiots who like their own ideas, and frown on open discussion of reality, and drift further and further away from the practical wisdom of the folks on the loading dock or the production line. They don’t want to know – just give them the sausage, now!
I have a separate essay coming up, about energy and industrial policy in Canada (thrilling, right?) LOL – So I will use that as an excuse to NOT digress in that direction (just this once, to prove I can).
Instead, let’s come around the bend to the home stretch again, but try to see the place afresh, with some of the stuff that we’ve just considered.
When facing the Trucker Protest – which absolutely was citizen motivated and lead, from the start, Trudeau used the secret intelligence apparatus of the state, to falsely accuse a podcaster, of being a violent militia leader, fraudulently justifying a state response to protest (OUR SACRED RIGHT), which was disproportionate, to the point of being crude and punishing state brutality of political opponents.
He used the cheapest propaganda techniques of all time – look, I have a photo here, of Iraqi WMD – falsely claiming proof that legitimate citizen protest was actually extremist foreign destabilization (again – lying, knowingly) – to say that any citizen’s absolute right was instead now TREASON.
De-banking is violence, make no mistake. Doing it without any trial or fair hearing? Grotesque.
But here is the most offensive part. Justin did all of this simply because it was politically expedient, hyper polarization seemed to be working so well in the USA. Thing is, one of the very few things we can objectively say is better about Canada than the USA is WE DON’T DO THAT SHIT – ASSHOLE.
Seriously – we definitely argue (and in many ways, we are even more a federation of distinct nations than our southern neighbours) but we argue less, and are far more civil, when we do. We even have scads of national myths which are about spectacular compromise and even outright useful defeat, (I love the Upper Canada Rebellion), rather than tales of bloody victory and vanquished foes.
Must also note here – Canadians often fail to credit the helpful push we got from Americans who moved here when State laws chafed, and then added their rebellious weight to great events like the Upper Canada Rebellion and the Winnipeg General Strike, to a degree we rarely mention. (thanks!)
My point is that Trudeau was the one who was acting like a hostile foreign agent. Fed up westerners were just doing what fed up westerners have been doing throughout our history. Marching to Ottawa to try to figure out – what are those freakin’ idiots thinking? How can they ignore so much reality?
Just because the lies were so thick that they persist in the heads of many, I should clarify. The Trucker Protest was NOT against the vaccines themselves, the way it was deliberately misrepresented, to discredit their far more reasonable cause. It was about the mandate – the state force applied – which in retrospect, absolutely was a mistake, because you ALWAYS provoke a backlash with any use of force-over-suggestion in policy (this is well known) and the voluntary uptake was incredibly high in Canada anyhow – especially among truckers – another contrast with our American friends (and a subject for more detail, elsewhere) – we’re way more compliant.
It is possible to make the argument that if the pandemic was as lethal as they feared it might become, and the vaccines were as effective as they initially claimed – both of which we now clearly understand were not ever true – a drive to promote vaccination by force might have been justified. (Though it still contradicts longstanding wisdom about pandemics, including the ACLU’s own major legacy position paper on the subject).
The sacred principle which was violated, though, was, like borders in Europe and Africa, something that you really ought not ever to mess-with, because you are bound to stir-up nearly infinite trouble.
Caitlin Johnstone, who writes courageously (by which I mean honestly and usefully) about her own experience of domestic abuse, and stands for abortion rights very clearly on ethical freedom grounds, in part because of that experience, noticed right away that the mandates destroyed our generations-long historical presumption of bodily autonomy. Each citizen deciding for themselves what is best for their life. Voluntary informed consent and personal control, without any untoward state intervention.
It’s even worse than just undermining the basis of abortion rights, though, we are opening up the idea of mass state medical compulsion, right on the edge of genetic engineering combining with artificial intelligence. Mistakes of a scale never before seen in the history of mankind are right now possible.
The precedent to force them on many, feels way too much like Jim Jones and his poison kool-aid.
Which really is the single worst possible dividend for us all to take at last, from the counterculture.
So – what do the guys on the loading dock say? Are they always polite? Nope. They swear and insult and joke and laugh and work like hell. They keep contact with reality, by breaking politeness.
And what does a customer say to you, when you’re behind the counter, and they went straight into university without ever stocking a shelf, or cleaning a public washroom, or coughing-up chemicals?
Any f@cking thing they want – because that customer is in fact, (and this is THE big one, for retail wisdom) a special-case sociopath. You don’t exist to them as a person, just the function they wish to access through you – for which they probably have that same lazy (profit always equals greed) bourgeois-left contempt – plenty of which they are likely to wipe all over your face, if you let them.
You can’t un-see this. It is real as real can be. So is the fact that huge numbers of people go through life without ever noticing it. That friend of yours who seems so nice, but always yells at the server? That’s not a nice person who sometimes slips-up – that’s a psychopath, who mostly hides it!
My regular readers will already know the Dave Barry quote I so revere, it is almost in-house scripture.
“If someone is nice to you, but not nice to the waiter, they are not a nice person”
And here’s the truly f@cked up thing – these idiots are so sure their ideal conceptions are morally superior to all the riff-raff who might contradict them (and should probably be regarded as terrorists, just for that) they think the workers and servers who they casually abuse, all day, every day, are bad people!
No really – again, I’ve shared this foul and ignorant mindset, so I can testify to the purity of the contempt. Once you persuade someone that say, wind and solar are the answer, they suddenly become a little wind-up moralist, preaching their one-note (and proven obsolete) salvation to the world – especially when they can use it as a club they can wield, to prove their moral superiority!
Again – wind and solar is not a subject I can treat simply here – but did before, and will again soon (not at all against the tools, just their consistent, insanely inappropriate, corporate extortion and banking-domination use).
What we’re really back to – eternally – is “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”
Using abstract ‘environment’ as an internal rationalization to be inhumane to people, is madness.
There is a very popular heat-map of human brain activity, which the kids on the right have been enjoying an awful lot lately. They suggest it shows that conservatives associate caring emotions with family and community, where liberals associate it with trees sunsets and rocks. I am sure it is far more meme than science, but having spent my life on the left, there is way more than nothing to it, all the same. Idealism and psychopathy really are easy friends, and always like to promote each other.
So here’s the thing. Do academics ever talk like the guys on the loading dock? Nope. Politicians? Even less so. They can’t afford free and easy grounding humour, too many jealous knives around!
In fact, if a politician started to talk like a typical shipper or driver on a busy loading dock, that is, sloppy and a bit reckless, but in the direction of laughing at reality, instead of hiding it, other politicians and even citizens at large might well judge them unhinged, insane, out of control.
But when a tight-ass know-nothing who thinks like that, tries to write rules of conduct which apply to the guys on the loading dock? Every foul classist and professionally deformed bias is magnified and given the weight of state force, which is to say, these idealists casually obliterate rights and dignity of workers (yet again), pretending all the while to be underdogs, even as their irresponsible and often flat-out incompetent economic planning creates whole new unnecessary underclasses, where once there was thriving.
Yes – this is ASSHOLE CUSTOMER legislation. Special Case Psychopathy, backed up by federal law (monopoly of force). They know what we are, and so don’t have to ask us – they will tell and force us to be more like them, instead – and never mind if anyone can ever do competent plumbing again!
Too boring to be fascist, too mechanical and impersonal to be imperialism. Just purest psycho shit.
Human beings are simply not what academics, tycoons or professional politicians think we are (thankfully). We’re not “hackable meat puppets” (surely craving above all, to be yoked, in Bezos’ wet dreams) we’re not the worst thing we ever said, or the most tasteless joke. We don’t need to create whole new classes of political prisoners for thought-crimes. That will make everything worse, not better. We need jobs and worker dignity, housing, totally normal stuff that we’ve always needed, and ‘our betters’ in government and business used to be far more able (willing?) to provide.
Not so exciting to the idealists, I’ll grant you, but like I said – if you went around popping every single balloon-axiom upon which the academy (post modernism in particular) has built conceptual model towers, the whole snooty ivory tower world, would look like something out of a freakin’ Godzilla movie!
Places to live, jobs which lead to stable shelter, hope for kids, none of this is rocket science.
Choices like Forty Billion (actually way over a hundred and fifty, if they costed it honestly) for an overpriced foreign attack plane (crap, for patrol) that doesn’t even have an engine that works?
I mean sure, I will grant you some rocket science was involved in that giant con, but no guys, just no.
You want to restrict YOUR OWN right to speak? All the way down to zero, maybe? (hint hint) GREAT!
But just for once in your arrogant narcissistic asshole customer life – leave the fucking workers alone!
You are actually going to need a good plumber one day.
Another asshole customer with delusions of grandeur willing to damage national culture for generations by importing foreign division and racism for personal political advantage?
Yeah, really not so much.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I promised you something genuinely hopeful and here it is.
“Every Company Should Be Owned By Its Employees” by the brilliant writer (often writing about writing) Elle Griffin.
Her substack “The Elysian” is much recommended – always a welcome gem in the in-box. Even when she has hard news to deliver (like her recent viral piece about how little money, writers actually earn), she always delivers it with clear hard numbers and a funny and humane tone!
And now something genuinely depressing, but too important to just ignore. Can’t even call this monstrosity an over-reach, really (though of course it is), when it’s really more of a reach-around by a creepy old senile club of casually entitled worker-rapists, desperate to hold power. BAD TOUCH!
In case I got you excited with some of my ideas about the pandemic, which did not seem adequately supported, I go into a whole lot more detail about all of that (with plenty of hard and very informative numbers) here.
Cheers! Curiosity IS the good stuff.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A key point I may not have adequately emphasized above. From the "Asshole customer" mentality (a bourgeois fake-left psychotic narcissism familiar to many - especially those they step on, every single day) the performative is everything, and the essence (reality, skill, experience) entirely irrelevant.
During our long shared medical emergency, we should have said the most important things were medicine, science, respect, and social cohesion. Medical people worked like crazy, and right behind them came shippers and truckers, who kept every one of the cozy laptop brigade, who COULD work from home, (and seemed to consider everyone who couldn't, subhuman) - well-fed!
But the Asshole Customer brigades in power around the western world decided that the most important things were actually obedience and political advantage.
That's why they fired 25,000 experienced medical people - just in Ontario alone, for failure to comply with radical invasion of bodily autonomy, and suppressed what we now know for sure was not just helpful, but outright crucial science.
At the PEAK, they said - who needs doctors and nurses? What do they know?
What ultimately beat the pandemic was mutation (omicron) and the incredibly wonderful human immune system. The rest was far more about politics, control, force and money than science. (Ivermectin WON the lawsuit against FDA, folks)
As for lockdown mania (which evidence now clearly shows was not effective, just like every legacy policy paper about pandemics said)
EVERY KID IN THE WESTERN WORLD WAS SEVERELY DAMAGED - and these assholes still act like they were glorious heroes who saved humanity, instead of halfwits whose outrageous incompetence was revealed, and did harm to millions which will last for generations. (a vast culture-massacre, too)
Amazing how reliably we get infuriated about propaganda bad guys all around the world, "Get them, smite!" comes easy - but we still can't even show simple solidarity WITH OUR OWN CHILDREN. The west is done, folks. KA-PUTZ.
At least until we turf-out these flattering but empty poseur scumbags, and start talking to each other like humans again, instead of enemies (which was always about politics, and never about society or progress of any kind whatsoever).
Just didn't want anyone thinking that all I was talking about was abstractions.
Nope - life!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And yes, the above use of mass state force against skilled workers also counts as an example of the wholesale betrayal of rights, which that Asshole Customer class so casually and frequently invokes, to get their way.
The best of those medical professionals - self motivating and relentless - but then fired for having philosophical convictions and/or well founded skepticism - will not ever want to go back into the field - leaving (as in the body of the piece) a wasteland of conformists, across a whole slew of institutions where we all know the rebel of principle counts for a hundred, in terms of making stuff better!
(yup - mandates purged the ranks, and made inside change-agents verboten)
RIGHTS ARE FOR A REASON (so are thinking, compassion and principle)
Furious conformist mobs are for one thing only - burning civilization down!
(and we've been way too dry, too long, to take any more match-throwing)